I grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those conservative evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the right-leaning doctrinal divergence of some Restoration Movement churches from the über-liberal Disciples of Christ denomination circa the early and middle parts of the 20th century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from the lips of my father, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”
Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. As I said in a past post (“Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm, Part 2“), in a discussion of how important it is to find your natural creative condition, you simply can’t know your innate creative rhythm — occasional, erratic, or prolific — until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. I illustrated this with examples, excerpts, and insights from the lives and works of Philip Larkin, Alice Flaherty, Joe Hill, Amy Lowell, and Victoria Nelson.
Here I present a few more examples to illustrate the point — which, to repeat, is that there’s a wide variation among people in how their creative demons consent to being accessed and how their muses consent to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then to stay in touch, with your own demon muse, so that when your it speaks, you speak, and when it’s silent, you remain silent.
But bear in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be writing the whole time. This is not a contradiction but a subtle distinction. For more such seeming contradictions, wade into the following choppy sea of advice from well-known authors.
Flannery O’Connor: “Three hours every morning”
Flannery O’Connor was a firm believer in the value of discipline in a writer’s life. She famously suffered from lupus, which was both a help and a hindrance in her attempt to maintain the discipline of a strict writer’s routine, since the severe pain of the condition took away her ability to perform many daily activities, which left her free to sit and write. But then, as any sufferer of rheumatic illnesses can tell you, sitting for long periods can produce as much discomfort as moving.
Her recommendation that writers ought to sit for several hours and do nothing else but write has become the stuff of legend. When her friend Cecil Dawkins talked in a letter about a dry spell she was experiencing, and said she sometimes used reading as a way to distract herself from the tedium, O’Connor responded with this:
You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading.”
As seen in editor Rosemary Magee’s 1987 anthology Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor returned repeatedly to this point, stating it in various ways that, taken together, leave no doubt about her meaning:
“People seem to surround being-a-writer with a kind of false mystique, as if what is required to be a writer is a writer’s temperament,” she says. “Most of the people I know with writer’s temperaments aren’t doing any writing.”
Miss O’Connor is writing steadily three hours a day, regardless of her mood. “If I waited on inspiration, I’d still be waiting,” she says.”
* * *
“I do try to write at least three hours every morning, since discipline is so important.”
* * *
“I sit there before the typewriter three hours every day and if anything comes I am there waiting to receive it.“
Dani Shapiro: Attracting the muse through hard labor
Best-selling novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro described her experiences with the reality behind the idea of inspiration in a 2010 blog post in which she sounded a lot like O’Connor. After stating that if she had given in to the notion that she ought to wait for inspiration before she started writing, she probably would have written few if any of her seven books, she clarified:
Don’t get me wrong. Inspiration has come. It has tiptoed into my writing room when I’ve least expected it. It has shown up mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-idea. But it generally doesn’t precede me to the desk. Inspiration comes out of doing the work: the hard labor of laying each brick on top of the next, one at a time, until what you’ve done begins to resemble a wall. Often, it doesn’t resemble a wall, or it’s come out crooked, or in some way less than you’d hoped, and you have to smash the thing up and start all over again. Inside this painstaking labor is where inspiration lies. Only when you’re up to your eyeballs, covered in dust, hopeless and bordering on despair, does the muse even consider paying a visit.
– “On Inspiration,” June 25, 2010
Stephen King: The muse is a cigar-smoking guy in the basement
In his 2000 best-seller On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King characterizes the muse as a rough-hewn guy in the basement of the psyche. I’ll just let him speak without preface, since he is, as always, matchless in his ability to elucidate his own points:
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.
….Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.
Gayle Brandeis: Indiscipline, non-writing, and filling up the well
In a 2010 interview for Psychology Today‘s “Creating in Flow” blog, novelist, poet, and essayist Gayle Brandeis fessed up to a total lack of discipline in her life as an author. Read carefully:
Q: Can you share your writing schedule or process with us? Because I know you have had a really challenging year and you also have a new baby. And two blogs!
A: I am a completely undisciplined writer. I have no schedule, other than writing when I find slivers of time. My tendency in the past has been to write in big sloppy bursts — I sometimes go for weeks without writing, and then I’m consumed by the need to write and it will gush out quite abundantly (plus I’m a big fan of writing a quick first draft and then using subsequent drafts to shape and hone the work).
The non-writing times have been fertile, percolating times, filling the well so it can spill over again. I haven’t been writing much lately, but this feels a bit different — I’m getting used to life with a baby again (my older kids are 19 and 16) and am still processing my mother’s suicide last November and the sudden death of my mother-in-law this March, and all of those things have deeply impacted my writing life as well as my daily life. I don’t blog as often as I’d like to, and when I have a moment to write, I often just need to take that time to decompress and not do much of anything.
I’m trying to be gentle with myself and not push myself too hard, but I do want to find a better rhythm that creates more space (especially inside myself) for my creative work. And I’m returning to teaching soon.
– “How a Writer Turned One Rejection into Two Novels,” June 21, 2010
Writer, teacher, and creativity expert Jurgen Wolff, who alerted me to this interview with a post at his Time to Write blog (“So you don’t write every day? Read This!“, July 8, 2010), draws out the implication of Brandeis’s experience for other writers: “She’s so ‘undisciplined’ that she’s managed to write three novels. In the interview she talks about how her book ‘My Life With the Lincolns’ was rejected as an adult novel and she re-worked it as a Young Adult book, which also required energy and commitment. So here’s to us ‘undisciplined’ writers, it turns out we’re not impostors after all!”
The point: To thine own deep self be true
If you’ve been trying to ferret out a running theme in all of the above, you may have felt confident that you had it until you ran into Brandeis’s words, at which point you may have heard the archetypal sound of a needle scratching on a record. Flannery O’Connor, Dani Shapiro, and Stephen King all say you have to work hard, put in long hours, shed blood, dig deep, get covered in mud and filth, in order to attract the attention of the muse. Only when you’ve reached your own farthest extremity and exhausted all of your own strength, they say, will the muse pay attention. This echoes wisdom from other writers whose words you’ve seen me quote previously, e.g., Steven Pressfield, who in his March 2010 blog post “Habit” (quoted in “Learn the Art of Active Waiting“), asserted that “The Muse is like any other boss; she values talent, yes, but what she favors even more is devotion, dedication, perseverance. When she sees our butts in our seats, she can’t help herself; ‘Okay, okay, I’ll give this poor sucker a couple of ideas today.’”
Your purpose is to find out the best way in which your creative demon needs to have a space cleared for it, and then to execute that particular action (or non-action, as the case may be).
But then here comes Brandeis, who says, “I write when I feel like it.” And she makes a great career out of it. And even when she talks about trying to improve her creative rhythm, she talks about doing it gently, in a way that creates more space not primarily in her outer schedule but within herself.
So what, then, is the overall point? It’s none other than what we started with: To thine own daemonic self be true. Your purpose is to find out the best way in which your creative demon needs to have a space cleared for it, and then to execute that particular action (or non-action, as the case may be). If writing every day and zealously guarding that carved-out span of time is the way that you and your demon muse need to work, then run with it, and run hard. If, on the other hand, you find through trial and error that you really need to wait until your daemon asserts itself spontaneously by filling you with the desire to write, then run with that instead.
In my own experience, I’ve found that both of these possibilities require serious dedication and self-clarification. It may sound at first blush as if the O’Connor-Shapiro-King-Pressfield approach is the one that’s all about discipline, and that it’s diametrically opposed to the Brandeis approach, which is all about indiscipline. But in fact it constitutes a serious discipline in its own right to keep yourself attuned to your inner states and motivations as you’re waiting for a ripe time to begin writing.
In both cases, the ultimate point is the same: The muse/daimon/genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate it, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary, so that when it shows up, you’re there for it.
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDITS:
“Gothica” used under Creative Commons from raffaelbrustia at Flickr
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